🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶

Sorry. I just thought it was funny in the context of a post about how it’s hard to remember all the conversions for imperial.

Uh, I’m pretty sure you divide mm/25.4 to get inches.

It’s because, for the most part, it doesn’t actually have access to the text itself. Before the data gets to the “thinking” part of the network, the words and letters have been stripped out and replaced with vectors. The vectors capture a lot of aspects of the meaning of words, but not much of their actual text structure.

It’s so frustrating. I’m planning to keep my current phone working for a couple more years if possible, but after that I really have no idea what I’ll do. Kinda hoping one of the other Linux phone initiatives gets going more by then.

https://i.etsystatic.com/14338826/r/il/16c982/1826291573/il_794xN.1826291573_d5ep.jpg

Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.

Obligatory XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/1428/

I sincerely think that China’s massive government investment in solar panel production is the biggest thing our species has done about climate change. It’s the reason it’s now cheaper to build a new solar plant than to continue to operate an existing coal-powered plant. (Though we’re not doing that in the US, because we’ve bottlenecked grid connection requests, which is holding up a ton of new solar buildouts.)

I mean it’s not enough yet, but it’s made a huge dent in the problem. Economics actually favor shifting to renewables at this point. It’s just the entrenched interests working against it we have to overcome now.

Bulgur wheat makes a really good textural element in vegetarian chili.

I mean, Laura Loomer has literally called for 65 million people to be fed to alligators, so this would practically qualify as a moderate position by current GOP standards.

“We know some of you have concerns about whether these headsets will be supported long enough to justify the price. Allow us to set those concerns to rest: they won’t be.”

Yes, to an extent they do different things, but that’s not what the person you were replying to was talking about. For several years there was this idea that “left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and right-handed people are left-brain dominant.” And along with that went this whole astrology-tinged thing about the right brain being the creative half and the left brain being the analytic half and whatnot. It’s pretty much nonsense.

Seriously. This is exactly what people object to about Windows Recall. In its re-released version at least it’s opt-in for now, but it’s still eerily close to this.

Good news on the latter front, actually: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-expands-investments-in-the-u-s-to-usd165-billion-with-new-fabs-and-r-and-d-center-a-closer-look

Yeah, I had the same thing with the photos of diseased bodies and the disparaging of contraception. I remember in particular that the textbook chapter on abstinence was immediately followed by the chapter on parenthood, which felt like it left a pretty conspicuous gap.

Amusingly there were two very different Health Class experiences to be had at my school. You were assigned one at random, you couldn’t choose which teacher you got. One was a first-year math teacher and member of an unsuccessful local Christian rock band. He’s who I had. The other possibility was a lesbian gym teacher, whose class was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a LOT more useful.

But yeah, the 90’s kinda sucked, and I hate that the US is trundling back towards that kind of “education.”

I guess I sort of agree? It’s a bit tricky to get it set up, for sure. Even just installing windows is probably beyond the average user, and this has a few more quirks and gotchas than normal.

E.g., in IoT LTSC 11 (which is what I’m actually currently using), when you connect a controller, it’ll bring up an error message about not having a handler for ms-gamebar, and fixing that calls for regedit. (One it’s fixed, though, it stays fixed.) It also got itself into a bit of a weird state during the initial installation where it wanted me to log in with a kind of account I don’t have, and while I was able to bypass that, I don’t think I did it in quite the right way, and it broke something in the install and I had to do an in-place repair install to fix it before it would install certain updates successfully. It was also failing to download the in-place repair install, so I had to look up how to do it manually using the install DVD I’d burned previously. But that fixed it, and it’s been fine since.

So, yeah, it’s got pitfalls and quirks and glitches. That’s also been my experience with other Windows installs, though, so it didn’t seem all that different in general.

But once you get those initial hurdles sorted out, it’s really just like normal Windows. Better, even, since it doesn’t have all the cruft built into it, like Cortana, Teams, OneDrive, start menu ads, nag screens about upgrading to 11, the Microsoft Store, etc. (Though you can add most of those if you really want them.) My aging parents aren’t willing to upgrade to 11 because they’re afraid too many things will have changed, and I’m thinking I’ll probably switch them to 10 IoT LTSC instead. I’ll just have to be careful to make sure everything they want to do works before I leave them to it. It still gets monthly security updates and everything.

Unless you switch to IoT LTSC, which will continue to get security updates until 2032. It’s kinda bullshit that they’re still making the security patches and then just refusing to give them to consumer 10 users.

As far as I can tell, this is a user who reviews games that use Denuvo, and always reviews them as Not Recommended, but will change that review to “Informational” and the review text to “Denuvo removed” when the game removes Denuvo. There may be other circumstances when they’ll change it, though, so if you’re thinking of actually buying one of these games, it seems wise to click on the game’s “Not Recommended” or “Informational” and then scroll down on the store page until it shows you the relevant review. It should be highlighted on the page, though you have to scroll a ways down to see it. There is also a box just after the controller support info that lists 3rd party DRM a game uses, which should be there if the games uses Denuvo.

The “specific program” I have trouble with is Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). There are projects that try to run it through Wine, but there’s a specific function that isn’t implemented in Wine right now that Fusion relies on as part of its authentication service, so it won’t log you in correctly, at least on the default Mint install. I think at least one of the relevant functions is currently in the Wine beta, so it may work again in a bit–I did manage to get it working briefly at one point, but I somehow screwed it up again subsequently. (I may just have forgotten how I launched it…I think I have two versions installed at this point, the Flatpak and the Snap install.) But even when it worked it was slow and janky in a much more severe way than when it runs natively on Windows.

The “specific program” my dad is interested in is Hesuvi, a piece of headphone virtualization software that also does equalization and crossover. At some point I identified a program I though would work on Linux as an alternative, but I would want to test that before committing to switching his computer over from Windows, and I haven’t got around to that yet. Other than that he mostly uses Zoom, and I think I tested that and it worked okay in Mint, though my memory is a little weak on that too.

I dunno. Basically everyone has their own little patterns they use with their computers, and switching to Linux requires changes to those patterns. It’s an adaptation. That’s not to say it’s not worth it–for a ton of people it probably is. But I’m not sure my aging parents can do it, and thanks to Fusion, I’m not sure I can do it either, because I just don’t have a good replacement.

The other option I’m looking into is Windows IoT LTSC. That omits a LOT of the problematic bullshit.

I’ll figure something out before the end of support, anyway.